Hypocracy won't bring democracy
What Bush says and what soldiers do in Iraq
By Hamid Bakhsheshi
May 4, 2004
iranian.com
The airwaves have been soaked with
the news accompanied by those "pictures" -- pictures of American
soldiers mistreating Iraqi prisoners.
To be honest, I don't see why everyone is so
shocked about this. Not to defend these morons who weren't
smart enough to get out of the army, but what do we really expect?
Even though I don't believe this is a war, but
what do we expect in a "situation" like
this? I'm sure somebody will put an appropriate
name on this "action" later.
Like "police action"!
When I was in college, I worked for a carpet-cleaning
outfit. Few years into my "career",
we hired a guy to help. He was tall, very skinny, and about 43.
He had long hair and wore a mustache and beard. Your typical "Harley
Dude", if you know what I mean. He was actually
kind of scary.
Having a bit of seniority, I pulled my boss aside
and asked him, "What the hell man?" He smiled and said that he
was
a Vietnam Vet, couldn't get a job anywhere and
as a favor to an old buddy, he decided to hire him. Now, my boss
was not known to be a giver, but I didn't say
anything. I much would have rather have young girls working with
me, like he had always hired, but what the heck.
It made me quite
uneasy though. It was right in the middle of the hostage crisis.
I was a known Iranian in a small town, as White
as America can get. The small town in Kansas had a population of
about 25,000, which about 5,000 were students of the university
and out of the 5,000, about 10 had dark hair and skin, excluding
our basketball and football teams.
I started training the new guy
in the "art" of carpet cleaning. He was good and picked things
up quickly. I
started
talking to him and found out that he was actually a former member
of the Special Forces, a "Green Beret", as
he called himself. This was as "Rambo" as
they came. The more I found out about what he and his type of
SF did in Vietnam, the scarier it got.
He would tell me that his unit would kill indiscriminately.
Whatever and whoever stood in their way, including regular American
soldiers,
would be destroyed for the good of the mission.
He would tell me how they sat huts on fire and would
shoot anyone trying to get out. He would tell me that he still
hears the screams
of the Vietnamese trying to escape the burning hut. However,
it was funny that he would say these with a kind of a smirk. He said that they would ask for R&R, which I didn't
and don't know what it means in the army, and
when they would be denied, they would go out and take it out on
the locals by beating them, hanging them, or whatever it felt right.
One commanding officer told them if they want R&R,
they have to kill so many North Vietnamese and to prove they had,
they must
bring back their ears. Actually ears for men killed and breasts
for women. So many pairs of ears and breasts equaled so many days
off.
I would listen to these stories while we cleaned
people's homes. They would frighten me, for the most part, but
mostly
they made me hate war and the ever presence of America in almost
every single one in the past century.
I don't know if this guy was telling the truth
or not, and for the most part, I discounted his tails. But as I
got older, the books I read, the articles I have come across and
some of the movies and documentaries that have come out of Vietnam,
make this guy look very good.
I recently met a young woman on the plane from Vegas
to LA. She said she was writing a
short story
about her childhood in Cambodia. We talked for a brief moment about
her incredible childhood and what she saw as a 7-year-old girl
in Cambodia. I told her about my soldier-friend and she told me
that wasn't half of what happened in the region.
I don't know what makes a man, a soldier, who
thinks he's "defending" his
country over 10,000 miles away from his "country",
do what he does. I don't know why for the past
five decades America had to get involved in just about every
unrest in every corner of the world. She sure hasn't
missed a good war!
All I know is that most soldiers think that when
bullets are flying anything goes. Raping a woman or in case of
our proud Marines,
"man", is ok. Taking another human being's dignity
is all right, while you're invading their land.
But it does happen. Iraqis did the same
in Kuwait. Kuwaitis have been doing it to Filipinos. I am sure
Iranians did it to Iraqis and they returned the favor during Iran-Iraq
war, in which Americans had a role!
These may be a tough pill to swallow when
it comes to human behavior in certain circumstances, but there
is only one thing
that makes all the other war atrocities different from what the
American soldiers were doing in that notorious Baghdad prison.
Neither one of the mentioned countries above had
ever claimed to be "PEACE
KEEPERS" while raping and torturing the one's
they were invading. None of them, I'm pretty
sure, were ever claiming to be bringing them "freedom" while
attaching them to electrical wires and making naked human pyramids
out of them! This huge misspelling
of "Hypocrisy" that is being shoved down our throats and now
the Iraqis must be corrected.
Mr. President, the word is "Democracy",
which means social equality. The other one, which is the one you
are practicing, as your forefathers did, means insincerity, double
standard, pretense, and two-faced. I'm sure
you know where each of these meanings fit perfectly with what you
have been saying to the Iraqi people and what your soldiers are
doing to Iraqi people.
.................... Say
goodbye to spam!
*
*
|